Programming, Internet and life

I wrote a little Ruby script to find out which words I use most frequently in my weblog. Basically, I filtered out all words that are either of the kind “the”, “a”, “for”, etc, as well as words that can mean different things in different contexts, such as “clear”, “create”, “problem”, etc. Then I took all words that were used 10 or more times and listed them. Manually, I removed duplicates, such as “wrote”, “written” and “writes”, and kept “writing”. Here are the words, alphabetically:

abstraction api app apple architecture article blosxom book bug childhood class cocoa coding communication company crawl customer data design development dock entry experience feedback framework google html idea index information interesting internet interview java life mac metaphor method model money morning movie news obex object objective-c opinion os page paper people planning positive post process programming project protocol reading relationships search server simple site software spam system talk team testing text web weblog wiki writing wwdc xml xp zen

I suspect that “non-technical” writing must contain much less of “strong” keywords. Or do I really write so much about everything related to developing software? Perhaps I do.

Part of my motivation for assembling this list of words was to find out which sections I should have in my weblog. I tried to form categories out of these words, and the dominating one is software development, with words such as abstraction, architecture, communication, customer, feedback, etc.

Then there’s the Apple/Mac category (apple, dock, wwdc, etc), the Internet/weblogging category (crawl, google, post, search, spam, wiki, etc) and the “life” category (childhood, experience, relationships, zen). So, the essence of Tesugen is programming, Internet and life!

I like the idea to let categories emerge instead of being created upfront, although it seems obvious that I could have figured these out without writing a stupid script. It would also be interesting to factor in search terms that have sent people to Tesugen (from the referrer log). Perhaps I will do that later.